David Dobbs

Tag archives for David Dobbs

“Swine Flu and the Mexico Mystery,” my story on the swine-flu outbreak, is up at Slate. It looks at a question hotly pursued right now: Why does this flu seem to take a much deadlier course in Mexico than elsewhere so far? The answers will suggest much about what’s to come. Of the two two…

Skip this post if you don’t want to read a writer responding point by point to a self-indulgent, insubstantial attack by a major academic. I should say right off that I’ve long admired the more measured critiques that J. Douglas Bremner, a PTSD researcher and professor of radiology and psychiatry at Emory University, has offered…

Below are materials supplementing my story “The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap,” Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I’m starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn’t fit in the main piece — though…

My story in the April 2009 Scientific American story, “The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap“, just went online. Here’s the opening: In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress…

A coral atoll, from Darwin’s The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, 1842. For those teeming millions near Hanover, N.H., here’s notice that I’ll be giving a talk at Dartmouth at 4pm today — Thu, Feb 5 — about Darwin’s first, favorite, and (to me) most interesting theory, which was his theory about how coral…